I was recently invited to join the celebrations for the opening of Portugal Telecom's (PT) new tier 3 data center in Covilha, Portugal. On this occasion, CEO Zeinal Bava reported the completion of major milestones in a five-year transformation program, including: 1) the transition to a next-generation network (NGN); 2) the transformation of business models to become more responsive to changing consumer needs; and 3) a transformation of the customer experience to become a customer-centric organization. Mr. Bava also announced the launch of a public cloud that's freely available to Portuguese citizens and elaborated on PT's hunger for cloud business in a competitive marketplace. As a symbolic act, 38 companies — including Accenture, the Football Association of Lisbon, Banco BIC, and Wipro Portugal — signed a cloud deal with PT on-stage. PT staged this event, located at its new state-of-the-art facility, to demonstrate its capabilities for innovation in terms of resilience, architectural design, energy efficiency, and capacity. Here is what it means for PT: